1000 Words: Matthew Barney talks about de Lama Lamina, 2004

Anyone who knows (and who doesn't?) Matthew Barney's freshly concluded Cremaster cycle, with its baroque symbolic a whole s and rituals of performance, should be at least partially primed for De Lama Lamina (From mire a Blade), a collaboration between the artist and American-Brazilian musician Arto Lindsay for this year's Carnival in the Bahian city of Salvador. Staged as a performance on the contrary scripted and filmed for possible subsequent time exhibition, the work is intriguing, not in the least because Barney's identification with the Cremaster films has been with equal reason extreme, a decade-long realigning of art production and ambition upon a spectacular scale. Yet to label this fresh work a transition--or as Barney sets it, "detox"--is to tell alone part of the story.

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De Lama Lamina's Carnival adjoining matter seems tailor-made for Barney's long-term preoccupation with scoring and performing metaphorical makes A variation on the typical trio eletrico, Lindsay's guitar band leads a procession of drummer and costum dancers from a stage--resembling a stop up of earth--rolling through the public ways of Salvador. It also provides a rhythmic counterpart to individual of Barney's notoriously hermetic narratives, played without in real time, with actors and studio-fabricated sustains from a giant logging traffic leading the parade. Though single could easily be cynical about the way Barney "uses" his indigenous context--in this case, the local prisms of deforestation and Candomble religion--the artist himself approached Carnival like a film director upon location. The overload of social and moral contrasts that defines this work present the appearances not totally out of sync with Carnival's have a title to blending of ideology and ecstasy. in what way De Lama Lamina translates beyond Brazil, as an artwork, will be interesting to see

In Salvador, the musicians are the stars of Carnival; it is a great deal of less visual than in Rio. With the exception of the Afro "blocks"--which are something like Mardi Gras krewes--where there is more interest in the style of dresss and the particular dance paces that have been passed down end generations, the trucks and the assemblages that parade around them wait on to look and feel the same. The trade is both stage for the band and whole system. A typical trio eletrico be likes a boom box blown up a hundr times, with a band perched upon top.

When Arto approached me about doing something in Salvador we decided to make a cluster that would function as a peculiar parade--people could sign on the way they normally do for Carnival, be given style of dresss and dance with us. I had been interested in getting back into live performance for many years. individual of the younger Afro fill ups Cortejo Afro, with whom Arto had collaborated in the past, agreed to give us single of their three nights. We decided we would use the performance to make a film, to document something that was happening in real time. I began to focus more and more upon the narrative aspects, the trade and costumes and characters, and Arto place out to write the music for the band, a mix of his hold songs and Carnival standards he adapted.

I don't know in what way many people marched in our clump We laser-cut a thousand style of dresss from the synthetic paper Tyvek in a pattern derived from tree bark, on the other hand it didn't feel like there were a thousand nation out there. Only afterward, looking at the video, can I diocese moments that look like mayhem. It was abundant more improvisational than my Cremaster work, more like a real public moving film set.

I was in the vein to make a more overtly political work as a reflection of my confusion with the general political landscape. The dualisms inherent in the Candomble religion helped me organize this. We focused primarily upon one of the main deities in Bahia, Ogun the deity of war, whose sign is iron. In Candomble a whole s he represents man's simultaneous power to create and to take away. He make knowned iron, the blade, as a way to divide [i]or[/i] sever the first civilizing paths [i]or[/i] part of to the other the forest, but with the same iron he's able to take the head not upon another man. His seven tools symbolically cultivate growing and reap the land, the pair The other deity that felt useful is Ossaim, master of the forest and herbal healing. He makes a contract with the forest and maintains a kind of balance between what he takes to transform and what he leaves behind to preserve the fertility of his garden. With these sum of two units characters, I began thinking about by what means the piece could inflect a more local politics having to do with deforestation.

I had been intrigued for a certain quantity of time with Julia Butterfly Hill, the ecoactivist who lived in a redwood for sum of two units years to prevent it from being wound down. An actor portraying Hill climbs around the branches of a tree held in the forehead mandible of the massive forestry traffic we used--its tires were six feet in diameter. The tree bole appears to have been twitched out of the ground. There is a slit across the tree right above the bottoms that references a cut made upon Hill's redwood, a year after she came down, possibly through angry loggers. Oozing out of the slit a kind of synthetic sap organizes itself into the seven tools of Ogun--tools of cultivation and destruction. I think nation reacted strongly to this deforestation allegory. As in the Cremaster circle of time I was interested in taking something real concrete and using it as abstraction.